‘Queen talked Lord Mountbatten out of 1968 plot to oust Wilson’
New biography claims group of conspirators planned to overthrow Labour government
Lord Mountbatten came close to leading a cabal of industrialists, generals and tycoons plotting a coup against an elected Labour government, a new book claims.
The 1968 plot was designed to replace Harold Wilson, then the prime minister, with a coalition government to bring the country together, during what Lord Mountbatten and the conspirators regarded as a time of national crisis.
According to a new biography of Lord Mountbatten, the Prince of Wales’s great uncle and mentor, it took the intervention of the Queen to persuade him to cut his ties with the plotters rather than acting against Wilson, his cabinet and Parliament.
Drawing on contemporary diaries, Andrew Lownie, the period historian, reveals for the first time the full extent of Mountbatten’s involvement.
It came amid growing social upheaval, industrial unrest and economic decline, with demonstrations in central London against the Vietnam war, student occupations and increased trade union militancy leading to a belief among some in the establishment that society was disintegrating.
Cecil King, the industrialist and chairman of publishing giant IPC, began gathering senior figures around him who wanted to act. He believed Wilson, who had been elected in 1964 and again in 1966, should be replaced by a “national government” led by the likes of Oswald Mosley, the pre-war fascist leader, or a figure of the stature of Lord Mountbatten, who had overseen the withdrawal of Britain from newly independent India in 1947 and had recently retired as Chief of the Defence Staff.
Hugh Cudlipp, the Daily Mirror editorial director, told King in April 1968 that Lord Mountbatten had said to him: “Important people, leaders of industry and others, approach me increasingly saying something must be done. Of course, I agree we can’t go on like this. But I am 67, and I’m a relative of the Queen. This is a job for younger men. Perhaps there should be something like the Emergency Committee I ran in India.”
On May 8, Lord Mountbatten hosted King, Cudlipp and Sir Solly Zuckerman, the scientist and senior government advisor, at his Belgravia home, to discuss what to do about the Wilson government.
According to Cudlipp, Zuckerman expressed deep reservations about a possible coup, stating: “This is rank treachery. All this talk of machine guns at street corners is appalling.”
Lord Mountbatten appeared to some of those present to concur with Zuckerman and wrote of the meeting in his diary that evening: “Dangerous nonsense.”
Furthermore, he stated in a letter to King in July 1970 that “my views are unaltered” and repeated Zuckerman’s warning that to remove Wilson was “rank treachery”.
However, the mystery of the aborted plot to remove Labour from power deepened when King later released his diary entry for the May 1968 meeting, which according to Mr Lownie’s book The Mountbattens, “gave a rather different account” of what was said.
King wrote that after Zuckerman left the meeting, Lord Mountbatten told him “morale in the Armed Forces had never been so low” and that the Queen “is desperately worried over the whole situation”.
According to King, Lord Mountbatten “asked if I thought there was anything he should do”.
The book now reveals that in November 1975, Zuckerman – in what appears to be an attempt to set the historical record straight – added a crucial diary note to his own file on the May 1968 meeting.
This stated: “All I hope is that Dickie [Mountbatten] did not go beyond what we had agreed. The fact of the matter is – as Hugh Cudlipp knows only too well – that Dickie was really intrigued by Cecil King’s suggestion that he should become the boss man of a ‘government’.”
Mr Lownie says in his book: “It was beginning to emerge that Mountbatten had shown far more interest than he, or the others, had earlier admitted.”
According to Cudlipp, Lord Mountbatten – who was killed in 1979 when the IRA blew up his yacht – had even compiled a list of names for a possible national government, including industrialists, senior military figures and civil servants, as well as “moderate” Labour politicians.
Certainly Marcia Williams, Harold Wilson’s secretary and later Baroness Falkender, took the threat of a plot seriously, talking of Lord Mountbatten “as a prime mover in the plan”.
In a conversation with members of the press following Wilson’s surprise resignation in March 1976, Baroness Falkender said: “Mountbatten had a map on the wall of his office showing how it could be done. Harold and I used to stand in the State Room at No10 and work out where they would put the guns.”
What appears to have held Lord Mountbatten back from supporting, or even leading, a coup was not any loyalty he may have felt to Britain, but the influence of the Crown.
Mr Lownie cites Alex von Tunzelmann, the historian and scriptwriter, who – drawing on private information from Buckingham Palace – states: “It was not Solly Zuckerman who talked Mountbatten out of staging a coup and making himself president of Britain. It was the Queen herself.”
‘This is rank treachery. All this talk of machine guns at street corners is appalling’
The Mountbattens – Their Lives And Loves by Andrew Lownie (Blink Publishing) is out Aug 22. Visit themountbattens.com